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Sunday, December 21, 2008

The World is Fat

That is not a typo. It's a new book by Barry Popkin, The World is Fat, that points to the usual suspects: sugary drinks, cheeseburgers, sedentary lifestyle, as well as the less obvious ones like evolutionary biology, the global food economy, and the constant availability of food that he aptly calls an "obesogenic environment."

In case you forgot what an enormous (pun intended) problem obesity is in some countries and starvation in others, here's an alarming statistic: More than 1.6 billion people in the world are overweight. 800 million are malnourished. Somethings wrong here. Wowzers.

Read Newsweek's interview with Popkin here and Slate's take on Popkin and the novel here.